“I am hoping that you will not find it necessary to go, Mr. Dulany.  The plantation has never been in better shape.”

“And I’m glad to hear you say that, sir,” was the answer.  “Well”—­hopefully—­“things may change for the better in me, and so, good-day,” and spurring his horse he was off at a gallop down the broad road, and Ravenel stood listening to the horse’s hoofs clatter over the bridge, strike the soft road under the pines, and die away in silence before he turned into the bridle-path which led to the stables.

And a strange thing occurred but a few minutes after this interview, when Frank made his daily visit to the stables.  One of the head grooms explained a horse’s lameness to him as due to a bad place in the road near the north gate which, he finished, would probably not be mended until Mr. Dulany was over “his coming attack.”

“Is he drinking again?” Ravenel asked.

“For three days past,” the groom answered.

Francis made no comment whatever, but the next day he discovered the man’s suspicions justified, and the third, as he rode to Marlton, he saw Katrine, a pale-faced, desolate little figure, sitting on the garden bench, her head in her hands, the picture of despair.  About five o’clock Jerry drove to the station for Dr. Johnston, and the same evening after the dinner Nora O’Grady’s son, a red-haired, unkempt boy of seventeen, brought a short letter from Katrine, asking that the doctor be sent as soon as possible.

“Mr. Dulany is drinking?” Frank said, interrogatively, to the youth.

“Something fierce,” was the laconic answer.

“Is he better this evening?”

“Worse.  Heart’s actin’ up,” the boy responded.

At the end of the week, after three days spent with the Dulanys, at the old lodge, Dr. Johnston and Francis sat together at the dinner-table at Ravenel.  Mrs. Ravenel had left them, and the great doctor, in the admirably restrained and cautious language of the scientific mind, gave his findings in the case, as it were.

“Mr. Dulany’s habits,” the great doctor began, “I should say, after such superficial investigation as I have been able to make, may be cured.  One thing I have noted with pleasure.  He has lost none of his mental integrity.  He is capable of the truth concerning himself.  Generally those given to the alcoholic habit deny everything or secrete everything concerning it when sober.  Sometimes they are sentimental over it, given to self-pity, with even a certain desire for dramatic effects in the statements about themselves.  Dulany is still, so far as I can judge, honest.  To-day he told me the history of himself, with a gay humor in the telling.  He is a descendant, it seems, of the great and the gifted.  There are lawless loves behind him, a picturesque ancestry, artistic and, on the wrong side of the blanket, aristocratic as well.”

“It is the ancestry of genius,” Francis answered.